Minimal Install Option

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 03:36:08PM -0400, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> Saves space....i would say that at this point for the "intended"
> audience for rhl...saving space is not a priority. Diskspace is cheap.

Agreed.  I tend do "Everything" installs, even on laptops. :-)

[Though php-manual (or anything else north of 100MB!) doesn't belong in /var.
 If it isn't already fixed or in bugzilla, I should put it there ...]

I'm more concerned with manageability.  But I have little concern that
as rhl becomes community centered, alternatives to the official install
procedure will mature.


> But I'm sensing a very technical and very drawn out debate about what
> the pro's and con's to very fined grained packaging is.

Not from me ...

cf. why-can't-the-damn-developers-learn-to-use-soname.major.minor discussion. ;-)

> And the only
> people really qualified to wade into this one...are people who should be
> busy fixing high priority bugreports...instead of posting to this thread
> or sending email to me or you offlist. But I imagine taking a good hard
> look at what it would mean to allow multiple libfoo* installs would be
> another very enlightening discussion of the trade-offs among the
> interests of difference segments of the userbase..

Red Hat ends up doing it anyway with foo-$version and foo$oldmajor-$oldversion.
Look at GTK+, Qt, gcc, openssl, ...

> -jef"if only rpm-analyzer worked not only with hdlists but with
> installed rpmdb's...gui reverse dependancy trees are neat"spaleta

Yes, if dependencies are done right, one can prune pretty easily.
Still there are complications due to multiple virtual provides, like
"webclient" and "smtpdaemon".  And install/uninstall scripts can change
things.  Adding is *always* easier than changing or deleting.

Regards,

	Bill Rugolsky